The red double-decker buses filled with tourists are a familiar sight on the streets of New York City. It will be a surprise, though, when New Yorkers notice that some of those buses are now a slightly lighter shade. They're pink, to be exact.
Today at Pier 78 in Manhattan, Gray Line, the tour company that owns the buses, officially launches its new "Big Pink Sightseeing" tour. Money from ticket sales will be used to fund breast cancer research. "It’s the first of its kind in the Big Apple," said Gray Line New York's director of marketing, David W. Chien. "It’s for a great cause and it’s a great way to see the city." For every adult ticket purchased, $1 will be donated to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, helping the organization continue its work to find a cure for the disease.
Chien said that although the tour company has donated its buses in prior years for charity events like toy drives, this situation is different because the four pink buses that make up the fleet for the "Big Pink Sightseeing" tour will be permanent fixtures.
The "Big Pink Sightseeing" tour will be 90 minutes long, and is a bit different from the typical hop-on, hop-off format of other excursions. “We didn’t want it to be exactly the same,” said Chien. The tour hits many of the city's major landmarks, such as Times Square, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Central Park, One World Trade Center, and a view of the Statue of Liberty.
Besides educating sightseers on the history of the city, the tour will also educate the audience on the importance of early detection and regular mammograms. The Breast Cancer Research Foundation's director of marketing, Robbie Franklin, is pleased with the partnership between the Foundation and Gray Line New York. "They are doing a great job to get the message out," she said.
The idea for the “Big Pink Sightseeing” tour came from Nova Scotia, Canada. There, a pink bus was turned into a mobile classroom that passed through four provinces in Canada approximately five years ago,
“Thousands of people went through it,” said Dennis Campbell, president of Ambassatours Gray Line in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which converted the bus. “After two years of this campaign, the breast cancer screening rates in the region went from the worst in all of Canada, to the best in all of Canada. We realized this was something very powerful. We were so proud of it, we wanted to do more.”
To date, there are 42 pink Gray Line buses in operation in North America, including the four new ones in New York.
Pink buses are planned for Grand Bahama in the Caribbean in November, for Toronto, Quebec City, and Portland, Maine, in summer 2013, and a number of other North American cities are in discussions to do so, Campbell said.
The bus tours operate every day from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. They leave from the corner of 53rd Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan every half hour. Adult tickets cost $49, and children's tickets for 3-year-olds to 11-year-olds are $44.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
